Compass Lines
by SpiresAboveJosephine
Summary: Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go." Sequel to Maps.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** This is the sequel to my previous story, "Maps", which is also archived here - more sense will likely be made if read in order. This is Alt!Jack, and post-Doomsday by a year. Many thanks to my beta, **misssara**.

Chapter One

_The floating seeds of timeless travel_

_Come to rest in planes that don't exist_

_Visiting worlds of crystal beauty_

_Offering dreams so very hard to resist_

_I've seen the past, I've seen the future_

_Beyond dimension and into empty space_

_Finding questions, never answers_

_Living time behind another face._

Space, outer space, all that is beyond the Earth and the tiny young solar system, and past what twenty-first century technologies have tried to capture and photograph - all of the unimaginably vast, blackest black of it, strewn with innumerable burning stars and luminous planets spinning in the farthest reaches of forever. Longer than long stretches of pure emptiness hang in between the reaching, sparkling arms of galaxies that hold suns and worlds that flourish and die and are born in the blink of an eye.

A flash of metal and a whir of an engine, a machine made by human hands in the strangeness of the outermost edge of the galaxy - a pinpoint of a ship, so minuscule in its surroundings, a blip on the radar of space-time.

Inside, Rose Tyler huddles against the heavy, curved, window and presses her forehead to the glasslike surface, and attempts unsuccessfully to wrap her mind around all of what is above and below and ahead and behind. The enormity of what she does not know from where she stands makes her head swim slightly, and she turns away from the stars that are billions of years older than herself.

"D'you know how old you are?"

Jack looks up, distracted. "What?"

She begins to pace slowly about the ship, looking all around. Considering things in order, one and then another. "I dunno know how old I am - in Earth years, I mean. Lost track, all of that travelin' back and forth." Just the nights that were now and the days that were then.

Jack considers, raises a brow. "In earth years? Solar days? Intergalactic Time Units? Astronomical units? Parsecs? Carbon half-lifes? Planck units?"

"Yes," she says, prodding at a few small buttons in the wall.

"Don't touch that."

"Why? What is it? Teleport? Nanogenes?"

"Microwave."

Rose rolls her eyes. "Right. So..._Captain_, where are we headed?" She wanders away from the wall and resumes pacing, trailing a hand against uneven metal walls. Jack's ship alternates between spacious and cluttered, dark and flooded with artificial light.

"Somewhere under the radar for fuel and supplies. There are a few repairs I need to take care of." He springs to his feet to poke at an overhead monitor. "We'll stop at one of the colonies out here."

"Earth colonies?"

"Hm." He thumps the side of the screen with a good amount of malice, which flashes and flickers to life. "There," he indicates, waving a hand at the screen. "Colony E-3524. We should be able to stay unnoticed until I can get this piece of junk running properly."

Rose leans forward and peers at the monitor curiously, at the tiny human outpost hanging in orbit around a star, an echo of an imitation of Earth. "And _when _are we?"

"Just jumped ahead about...five hundred years."

She feels slightly giddy. "Never gets old, this." _You can go back and see days that are dead and gone, and a hundred thousand sunsets ago...no wonder you never stay still. _"After everything...didn't think I'd ever see any of it again."

Jack has to dismiss the sentimentality, not unkindly. "We can sightsee later. For now let's concentrate on staying alive." There was never any blue box to hide inside, at least not that he has seen.

"So far so good, yeah?" She kicks a foot idly against the grated floor and grins at Jack unrepentantly until he stops frowning.

"Catch," he advises, and easily tosses a piece of equipment her way.

She does, it is light, and turns it over and around in her hands. "What's it do?"

"Comm." He taps his ear. "I have one too, they're at the same frequency. Cell phone won't work out here."

"Used to," Rose thinks out loud, adjusting the comm around her own ear.

"Testing," Jack says, and she can hear him in her head.

She closes her eyes reflexively as they land, but stays on her feet.

Jack strides briskly out of the ship, she follows a few paces slower, experimentally toeing the dusty ground and looking every direction at once. It is warm and subdued, and she can taste water on the air and feel a breeze, and looks up to see a sky unexpectedly similar to Earth at twilight. They are on a bit of flat, elevated ground scattered with ships and vehicles of all shapes and sizes - car park, Rose thinks amusedly, and wonders at the nighttime.

"Artificial atmosphere," Jack explains upon seeing the question. "Five hundred years into your future back on your planet, and human beings make the edges of the galaxy look like Earth. We're a little reluctant to let it go."

"All of that space travel, an' we still can't rearrange the furniture," Rose says, and takes her eyes off the stars. There are buildings nearby, roads without cars, distant noises that sound like a familiar city. It glows softy in innumerable different colours and teems with energy, and they set off together.

"Just don't wander off," Jack tells her, intent on finding, Rose guesses, whatever the space colony equivalent to an auto parts store is nearby.

She trails behind, watching the throngs of people of every size, colour, and shape - some more human-looking than others, and manages to obey his instructions for a good two minutes. The rush of noise and movement is distracting, and she pauses, listening to chatter and shouting and trying to pick out familiar words – unidentifiable new languages that are now strange, the odd phrase in English here and there. Untranslatable, now.

Jack is nowhere to be seen, but she shrugs - they have not gone far from the _Bad Wolf_, and she has a comm. Someone brushes past, pushing her forward, and she sets off walking. Feet pressing against ground that no one from her time has seen or felt.

A bustling street marketplace, of sorts, tall tall buildings crowned with blinking lights and small square ones dotted with windows, spindly blue trees that line the street Rose travels down, streaming with people. She walks and walks, and half-wishes for someone to talk to, to marvel with, at everything, at the strangeness of the blue trees, at the thrill of exploring.

Jack steps back outside, looks to both sides – no sign of Rose. He is irritated, although not even vaguely surprised. A passerby on the road notices him searching, and stops.

"Are you lost?"

"No. Just looking for someone. Haven't happened to see a blonde running around here, have you?"

This earns a chuckle and a shrug. "Plenty. Depends on what you're looking for."

Jack has time to smile briefly before the sky caves in.

Rose frowns, perplexed, at the sky above - like clouds roiling before a storm, but with an artificial atmosphere? Something worries at the back of her mind as the sky begins to churn, and the warning bells scream shrilly a split second before a clap of thunder echoes, deafening, she can feel the ground vibrate beneath her feet.

But not thunder, Rose realises, and instinctively crouches close to the street and presses her palms against her ears as the sound booms and shrieks through the atmosphere - glass rains down onto the sidewalk beside her, the fragments crunch beneath the feet of people rushing past in alarm, yelling and shouting to be heard above the din.

She looks up again, sees a flash of metal against the sky, something huge. She shivers.

"Shit," she thinks out loud, and instinctively gets ready to run.

The comm buzzes and crackles in her ear, she holds a hand to it and can hear Jack's voice urgently in her head above the smothering noise.

He is yelling, and it is the first time she has heard him sound so frantic. "_Rose! _Can you hear me? Where _are you?_"

"I - I don't know," she replies helplessly, and looks around, trying to keep her balance admidst the shaking and rushing crowd, and thinks the worst.

"Well, figure it out," Jack advises, sounding strangled. "I'm sure this goes without saying, but we have to get out of here ten minutes ago."

Running is something Rose knows how to do with great, practised skill, and she takes off sprinting back the way she came, dodging people and broken windows and fallen tree limbs.

He spots her first, grabs her by the wrist without a word and she stumbles slightly in effort to keep up with him.

"What's going on?" She has to nearly scream to be heard.

Jack is grim. "That's a Time Agency ship up there. Give you three guesses why they're here." He barely notices how tightly his hand is wrapped around hers.

Rose pretends that she can not smell burning behind them, and tries for optimism. "The shopping?"

"Shut up and run," Jack advises, and the _Bad Wolf_ appears over the rise of the hill.

She is out of breath by the time they reach the ship, and leaps inside, heart pounding in her ears. Jack slams into the console, and she presses against the window and looks at the metal sky as the ship jumps and shudders and groans to life with effort.

"What are they gonna do?" she asks, still able to feel the ground shake, despite fearing the answer.

Jack doesn't answer.

He throws a control and the ship rockets upwards with enough force to throw Rose down onto the metal grating.

She feels about two seconds of elation at their getaway before the ship is rocked violently, every fibre of it vibrates and shrieks, and the sky outside lights up terribly, and she grabs on to whatever is nearest to pull herself up to the window, and sees a glimpse of smoke and sparks and the torn debris that used to be Colony E-3524 rushing toward them before the _Bad Wolf _rips a hole in time and flashes away.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

_And sometimes you close your eyes  
And see a place you used to live  
When you were young. _

The _Bad Wolf_ gives a final shiver, slows and coasts along shimmering starlight.

"Are you okay?"

Rose blinks, looks up from where she has landed in tumbled pile. Looks from Jack to the window, to Jack again.

"What - ?"

He walks over, crouches down to eye level. "Anything broken?"

Rose assesses her limbs, flexes her fingers. "No."

"Good enough."

"Why did they..." she trails off, troubled, searching his face for an explanation.

His shoulders droop imperceptibly. "I didn't think they would find us that soon."

Rose shakes her head in protest. "But they jus'...blew up everything, the whole Colony..." A burst of anger, indignation, rises above the shock. "Why? Why'd they have to do that? Those people didn't do anything, and now...because of _us_?"

But Jack's expression is closed, eyes dark. "It's getting harder to hide." He looks her over once more. "I'm landing us somewhere close. Tail took a blow."

She sets her jaw, lifts her chin, and scrambles to her feet. What else is there to say? The _Bad Wolf_ sets down on an unremarkable planet, in an unknown sect of time.

She walks ahead of Jack, up a slight rise in the ground, and the dry sparse grass crunches underneath her feet. The water below is almost black, still and stagnant underneath the flat grey sky. All around is complete and utter quiet, broken only by the rush of bitterly cold wind that lashes against Rose's face and whips at her hair.

She ignores it numbly, eyes focused intently across the water, and hears Jack as he draws up alongside her.

"What happened to it?" she asks flatly.

Jack shrugs, follows her gaze. "Dead planet. War, famine...gets abandoned."

Something skirts elusively around the edge of Rose's memories, and she frowns hard at the expanse of crumbled, dusty edifice in the distance. A flicker of recognition that she can't catch comes and goes.

"It looks familiar." Which it can't be, of course.

"They all do, sooner or later." One nameless empty planet out of hundreds. They stand in silence and listen to the wind howl, and Rose tries to remember and nearly stamps a foot in frustration.

"I could use a hand with the ship."

She trails after him, absently scuffs her sneakers against the uneven brown grass and watches it fly up and settle.Remembers the end of the world, so long ago.

Rose stares blankly at the tangle of wires in her hands and the scattered unidentifiable tools at her feet, at the back of Jack's neck as he bends over the side of the _Bad Wolf_, not seeing anything. Hands him whatever he asks for, he works quickly.

She clears her throat in the profound silence. "I'm sorry."

Jack doesn't turn around, and his voice is muffled, half-buried in the guts of the ship. "Why?"

"If..." Her voice catches and wavers, and she shuts her eyes momentarily and wills herself to hold back unbid tears. "If I hadn't gone off...I'm sorry, I..."

Apologies are so human. Jack straightens up to look at her. "If anyone's to blame, it's me, okay? They're not after you." And his voice sounds flat, and distant.

"All those people, Jack," she whispers, looking at him through a blur of tears that spill over and run down her throat. Sorrow and guilt have never become simply borne.

Jack half-wishes he could forget, and lets her sob into his shoulder, knuckles clenched white around the wool of his jacket.

There is no night and day inside of the _Bad Wolf_, of course. Rose climbs into bed when she can no longer stand up straight. It is quiet, for now, they are floating tucked away in a small, backwater corner of the galaxy and the radar remains silent as the engines drone methodically, repaired and patched up.

She lies on the narrow bunk with her eyes open to the uneven ceiling, memorizing the seams and edges and half-expecting the alarms and bells to scream and blare at any moment. But the only sound is Jack's muffled snoring drifting up from the cot below her, and she is vaguely surprised that he is able to sleep at all.

"Jack."

He shifts and sighs. "Hmm…?"

"If you could go anywhere...where? Where would you go?"

He doesn't reply right away. "Somewhere quiet."

"Really?"

"No."

Rose wonders how it is possible to feel so old and so young at the same time, and sleeps eventually, and dreams.

_A whisper of a breeze touches her face, and she opens her eyes to dancing light, and warmth, and in front of her a figure she knows better than anything and anyone in the universe._

"_Hullo, Rose." He smiles, and she can see every familiar detail, each strand of hair, each tiny line on his face, the marks and scuffs on his battered sneakers._

_She stares back, unwaveringly_. _"Am I dreaming?" She curls her fingers against her palms and can feel the bite of nails against skin. "Are you real?"_

"_Bit of both. When we're asleep, dreams are our only reality." He looks at her with complete understanding and something of compassion. "Rose Tyler. What have you gotten yourself into this time?"_

_She looks away briefly, fighting back a sob, if one can cry in dreams. All around them is delicate glowing light. Luminous gold settles around Rose's hair and reflects in the Doctor's fathomless eyes._

"_I miss you," she whispers, and the words taste bittersweet._ _"I never stopped missing you." _

"_I know," he says gently_. _"I know, more than you realise. But look at how far you've come, here and now."_

_She half-laughs, half-cries, and doesn't care. "No. I...I dunno what I'm doing. Are we doing the right 'fing? What'll happen to us?"_

_He shakes his head and is sad with her. "I can't tell you what to do, not anymore. It's up to you to figure it out. But wherever you end up..." __His eyes don't leave her face, and she feels afraid and sorrowful and safe and loved all at once. "Always remember who you are, my Rose."_

"_It never gets easier, does it," she says, and it is more acceptance than question._

_And so he doesn't need to answer, and they stand eye to eye in the gilded light, and Rose looks at the life that she had promised forever to, and doesn't want to wake up._

_A faint smile crosses his face. "But forever was never ours to give away."_

_She sighs and sniffles inelegantly. "I know."_ _And she does._

"_I am so proud of you, Rose," he says_, _full of admiration, and his hands are warm on her tear-stained face._ _"Now go and save the universe one last time, yeah?"_

_The space between them is as vast as a world and as thin as a sheet of paper._

_She closes her eyes at the soft press of lips against her forehead, and takes a last shaky breath of him, of the fading golden air, and the solidity of the ship materializes back into being all around her._


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

_And it's the stars _

_The stars that shine for you _

_And it's the stars _

_The stars that lie to you_

His words are still in her head long after she has awoken, and she finds she cannot shake the feeling of him no matter how hard she tries. But here, and now, is no dream, and she looks at Jack who is also not.

"I need to go see someone about a thing," Jack explains succinctly when she asks why they have landed on the smallest, darkest, dampest, most wretched-looking planet she has ever seen.

"That's informative, thanks." Her feet squish into the loamy ground, and she squints in vain against the impenetrable combination of pitch blackness and heavy-hanging fog.

"So what's it called?"

"Lguexderydor. Roughly translated."

"Lovely place. I can't see a thing, how d' you know where we are?"

"I know where we are," he assures her, strolling on ahead unconcernedly. She gamely hops along after him, ignoring the mud seeping into her trainers.

"Why's it so damp?"

"The planet's mostly water," Jack says without breaking his stride. "Lakes, rivers, swamps, you think Earth has big oceans..."

She stumbles over an uneven patch of ground and bites her tongue painfully in the process. "Bugger."

"Careful."

"And why's it so dark?"

"It's nighttime." He tosses a clever grin over his shoulder.

"No kidding."

"Nights are...oh, equivalent to about seventy-two hours in Earth time."

"Time-travellin' spaceship with all the technology in the known universe and you haven't even got a torch," she mumbles at his back.

"Look, I don't need -"

He is cut off by a sudden blinding flash, and he throws up an arm over his eyes and stops on his heels. Rose has been hurrying to catch up and collides full-force with his back.

"Shit," she mutters through her teeth, holding one hand painfully to her nose and the other over her eyes against the dazzling light. "What's...?"

The beam of light is lowered slightly. Jack blinks, and his vision slowly focuses on the somewhat gigantic electric torches aimed at him. By Lguexderydorans. With weapons. Rather, lots of very large Lguexderydorans with lots of very heavy weapons. It is important in such situations to be accurate, he reasons, and takes a head count.

Rose, well-versed in such situations, stands still and puts her hands in the air and opts to smile cheerfully at the half-dozen, unamused, seven-foot-tall aliens.

"Hello!"

"Don't 'hello' them, Rose," Jack hisses at her, and having concluded that they are indeed outnumbered, raises his hands as well and attempts to appear unassuming.

"They might want to talk."

"They don't want to talk."

"Yeah? How do you know?"

"I just don't think -" And then there is the muzzle of a weapon in his back and one of the Lguexderydorans is saying something which seems to be directed at him, but he can't be sure - the comm in his ear is not translating for him the way it should be, and all it sounds like is a stream of clicks and consonants. He silently thanks fifty-first century technology.

"My Lguexderydoran's a bit rusty," he attempts lamely, which earns him another jab in the back and a clawed, pale-skinned hand around his arm, and he and Rose are unceremoniously jostled forward into the murk.

Rose winces slightly at the tug on her arm, but otherwise does not complain, and for not the first time baffles at how unfamiliar it sounds yet to hear a language that is simply noise. _Down one_, she thinks. _No Tardis to translate and no magic sonic screwdriver to help and I'm too human and these aliens are taking me to who knows where . _

But still, she looks up at it and marvels.

"They look like fish."

"Great," Jack says.

The ceiling is dripping insistently.

"I think you've broke my nose," Rose says.

"What?"

"When I bumped into you," she elaborates. "I think you broke it." He hasn't, of course, she is simply trying to fill in the silence with insouciant words.

"Should watch where you're going." The water drops onto his head, and he swipes at it in annoyance.

She rocks back on her heels and studies Jack, who is furiously fiddling with his wrist comm, the little machine flashing and beeping in the quiet. She studies the room, which is very small and very dim and very unremarkable. _Well, _Rose amends, _it's got bars. Prison cell, then. With a leak in the ceiling._

"So what'd we do to make 'em so cross?"

Jack smiles briefly but doesn't look up."This place doesn't get many visitors."

"Can't imagine why," she says, casting an eye over the barred door.

But, Jack decides, today is a good day to be him, and a bad day to be a tiny backwater alien prison.

Rose is watching him intently.

"Haven't you got, um...the transmat beam hooked up to the ship?"

He's mildly surprised at this. "It was disconnected when we got hit. I'm trying to fix it from here, but it still won't be able to - " He looks up at her. "You still have that phone on you?"

"Ye-es..."

"Let me see it. Please."

She lifts an eyebrow, but hands the battered mobile over. "You're going to take it apart."

"Yep."

She winces slightly. Doesn't matter. It can't call where she wants it to, or had once wanted it to, not anymore.

"Can't we just..." she experimentally gives the old, rusted door a kick, and in response the bars rattle and creak. "I mean, it's not exactly top security."

"We could," Jack reasons. "We're being stealthy."

She very nearly gives a laugh at this.

"Right." _Don't argue with the designated driver...well. Some things, at least, are universal constants - including, but not limited to, alien prisons and time-traveling men._

So she paces the small space and decides to wait and see.

"Jack."

"Hm?"

"What did you do, before the Time Agency?"

He doesn't answer right away, absorbed in concentration on his work. "Why the interest?"

She shrugs. "Jus' wondered."

"I was with the Agency for a long time," he says, and it isn't quite an explanation.

Rose follows the crack in the ceiling with her eyes, watches the constant drops of

water. "London? 1940's?"

"Not that I can remember."

She hadn't expected so. It would have been too close, too much the same.

Jack is watching her watching the ceiling. "What happened to him?"

The corners of her mouth turn down and she looks sombre. "I don't know." She had asked the same question, more than once, only to be met with cryptic half-answers. He was left behind, and that is all she is certain of. Well, so was she. Perhaps now they're even.

The moment passes; the Jack in front of her clicks a part into place and springs to his feet. "Done."

She blinks away the memory. "Right, so, let's go."

"It can only teleport one from here," he tells her, very matter-of-fact.

She fixes him with a stare. "You're kidding."

"I'll have to get back to the ship first, and then I'll get you out from there."

"No way," she protests. She's not come all this way to be left in some leaky underwater prison, even if it is only momentarily. "Forget it, I'm coming with you."

"Bad idea, you might end up with five arms and no head. Which is considered attractive on some planets, believe it or not." He leans forward slightly, and she can feel the slight brush of his breath as he speaks. "Trust me." And he is gone.

Rose looks at the now-empty spot in front of her, and briefly considers the benefits of staying put in the little cell. After Justicia, she reasons, this ought to be a snap.

The lock on the door is just that, a single lock, solid but rusted, and she surreptitiously glances down the hall outside. Empty, still.

"Right," she mutters to herself, and digs the antenna from her broken mobile out of the fragments Jack has left on the floor, and determinedly sets about picking the lock.

Two minutes later she is slipping out the door, carefully and silently closing it behind her. It lets out a tiny creak, and flinches and barely breathes, waiting, but the long hallway remains empty and devoid of any sound other than the slow trickle of water.

_Transmat, my arse, _she scoffs silently, and edges forward with carefully placed footsteps along the uneven, slime-coated wall in what she sincerely hopes is the right direction.

Jack is back inside his ship, and drops the nondescript parcel in his arms onto the captain's chair before flipping a number of switches and pushing a number of buttons. The console lights up and the machinery hums to life, and figures and symbols flash across the screen, ordered and important. Back to business.

Less than minute later he glares reproachfully at the figures and symbols. "What do you mean, she's not there? Scan again."

It does, and with the same results. He thinks about how he'd like to blame it on faulty wiring.

"Well, where is she, then?"

Rose cannot see more than a couple of inches in front of her, and is on her hands and knees in a ventilation shaft. Or something very similar. What she assumes to be the exit is blocked, this, on the other hand, is particularly empty. Ventilation shafts, she reasons as she crawls forward, always lead somewhere, and almost always lead outside. On most planets, anyway.

Her hand slips in a particularly greasy spot, and she curses ventilation shafts colorfully and in the few languages she has at hand. Sooner rather than later would be good. She blows her hair out of her eyes with a puff of breath and intrepidly continues onward.

Jack looks at the flashing red dot moving across the radar on his wrist comm and states the obvious. "This is ridiculous."

He is striding away from the _Bad Wolf _in what he knows is surely not the most intelligent escape strategy, back towards the Lguexderydoran prison and back towards Rose, who has apparently seen fit to disregard what he has told her, and according to the radar, is moving somewhere in a hurry.

Jack slings the bulky gun back over his shoulder more securely and breaks into a jog, grumbling and muttering under his breath something about the importance of following orders, especially his orders, because he is _Captain _Jack Harkness and he damn well knows how to give orders -

"Jack!"

Rose, fair hair visible through the gloom, sprinting in his direction.

"What the hell are you _doing_?"

"Escaping -" she runs straight past him and towards the ship. "Hurry _up_!"

Jack can hear a veritable cacophony of shouting in the distance; obviously, their absence has not gone unnoticed. He spins around and accelerates and clatters up the ramp on Rose's heels.

"What happened to staying down there and waiting?" He is nearly shouting, leaping about the ship in haste to get it off the ground.

Rose shrugs, out of breath, nerves singing with adrenaline. "Picked the lock." She throws him an exultant grin. "Got away, didn't I?"

"Got half the planet after us now, don't you?" he shoots back, indicating the radar.

She looks unconcerned. Pleased, almost, he notes with exasperation.

"What's that?"

The _Bad Wolf _is safely through the planet's atmosphere, he programs a set of coordinates and they slide through several points of space and time.

"This," he says, picking the object up and looking at it in apparent admiration, "is the reason we made that little side-trip."

"And...what is it?"

"It's a type of disruptor." He turns it over in his hands. "Direct-energy weapon. Sends out electromagnetic waves strong enough to take out the power on five planets. It'll wipe out all communication, all computers, all generators...this is going to help us take out the Agency."

Rose eyes it. "Bit small for all that."

"Size," he says disdainfully, "doesn't always matter."

"Ah, a universal delusion." She raises an eyebrow. "And this is what you were doing after you left me in that hole?"

"Yep," he replies, unperturbed.

The _Bad Wolf _cruises silently through a milky-white cluster of stars, the red-and-gold reflection of the galaxy's furled nebula shines into the ship's interior.

"And where to now, _Captain_?"

"How's Orsilocus Protea 8 sound?"

It sounds fantastic. "Do they have chips on Orsilocus Protea 8?"

"No," Jack says. "But I can be presuaded to make an unscheduled stop."

_tbc _


End file.
